Dan Peeples ’17 of Pierpont, New York, portrays the husband in the Bates production of “The Breasts of Tiresias,” directed by Nick Auer ’15. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Guillaume Apollinaire’s surrealist play The Breasts of Tiresias, adapted and directed for a senior thesis project by Nick Auer ’15, appears in performances at 7 and 9 p.m. Thursday through Sunday, March 19-22, in a surprise location on campus.

Admission is free but tickets are required, available at http://bit.do/tiresias. Seating is limited. Audience members are asked to meet in the lobby of Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave. For more information, please call 207-786-6161.

Auer of Fairfield, Connecticut, has overseen the creation of an immersive, broadly sensory experience for Bates audiences.

“I’m excited to both throw the performers out of their comfort zone and throw the audience a little bit into the unknown,” Auer says, “and through that new, exciting venture, the themes and the voice of the playwright will come out in more visceral ways.”

Tiresias tackles heady topics including war, feminism and reproduction. The play follows the main character, Therese, as she decides to transform into a man. Shedding her breasts, Therese breaks free of the bonds of domesticity to become a general and a member of the Senate, roles traditionally reserved for men.

Translated from French and revised over the century, the play is a wink and a nod to the Greek myth of the blind prophet Tiresias, who transforms into a woman.

First performed in 1917, Tiresias was the first surrealist play of its kind. Surrealism explores elements of the seemingly illogical or absurd, and often breaks tradition with conventional narrative in order to touch upon the life of the unconscious.

The Bates production of “The Breasts of Tiresias” provides an immersive audience experience. In the red coat is Hope French ’18. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Auer hopes that his immersive retelling of the play will invite the audience to contribute their own insights. The production allows different parts of the play to be performed simultaneously while the audience travels between rooms. The action will include dance. This all adds up to an engaging, unconventional theatrical experience.

For Auer, bringing out the play’s surrealist qualities has been an exciting artistic and technical challenge. He has worked with theater professor Christine McDowell, who developed the costumes, and with classmate Guen Figueroa of McHenry, Illinois, whose design work for the production entails sets, lighting — and scents, although Auer won’t say more about the olfactory aspect, preferring that people come and have the experience for themselves.

“We’ve wanted to experiment with how we can incorporate all the senses,” Auer says. “Our collaboration has definitely been central to the development of the piece.” Like Auer’s, Figueroa’s work on the play is her senior thesis project in theater.

Auer believes the play resonates with contemporary issues of gender politics. “In the play, the gender binary comes through in terms of: You’re male or you’re female, and there are roles associated with both those genders,” he explains.

“Today, we have expanded our idea of what gender means. So, producing this play in 2015 gives it a contemporary voice by expressing all different sorts of ideas of gender.”

He was drawn to the play by the richness and complexity of Apollinaire’s language, and is interested to see how meaning and historical relevance will come through in a contemporary performance — and in collaboration with each different audience.

“Each performance will be markedly different depending on who is attending it that evening,” he explains. “Their response becomes part of the experience.”

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2015/03/13/auer-15-creates-an-immersive-interpretation-of-apollinaires-surrealist-play/feed/0Set to debut Nov. 3, the remodel of bates.edu was driven by mobilehttp://www.bates.edu/news/2014/10/31/bates-website-remodel/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/10/31/bates-website-remodel/#commentsFri, 31 Oct 2014 15:00:20 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=81648The major changes, including a homepage redesign, are all about making a website that’s easier to use and thus more valuable.]]>

A comprehensive remodel of the Bates website set to debut on Nov. 3 reflects the continuing sea change in how people are using the college website in 2014.

More and more, they’re going mobile, using smartphones or tablets.

The remodeled Bates home page as it will appear to a desktop user. The remodel team’s use of “personas” inspired the creation of the four Audience Message Boxes geared to specific constituencies.

Two years ago, one in six visitors to bates.edu viewed the site on a mobile device. Now it’s nearly one in three.

Ensuring that every website feature and piece of content renders well on tiny screens as well as big desktop monitors is as much a design and architectural challenge as it is a technical one, Cluchey says.

In that spirit, the new bates.edu incorporates a major homepage redesign and a new site-wide navigation menu, among other changes that, in the end, are all about making a website that’s easier to use for all visitors.

When it comes to website redesign, you need to know your users. And while 2.5 billion people worldwide are online, the Bates team zeroed in on just 12 users during the remodel process.

The 12 users, however, represent a conceptual twist: They’re “personas,” fictional people who represent the major public user groups of bates.edu.

To create the personas, a 12-person Usability Group, comprising staff from BCO and Information and Library Services, interviewed 50 Bates stakeholders from 16 college offices that communicate with various external audiences.

Their expertise informed the group’s understanding of the college’s many audiences and fueled the creation of the personas, the use of which is standard for usability projects, Cluchey explains.

As an example of the site’s responsiveness, the new home page will look like this to a tablet user.

“We’ve given each Bates persona a photo, a name, a hometown, and a set of specific attributes, including preferences, goals and top tasks for using the website,” Cluchey says. “We’ve created a list of do’s and don’ts for communicating with them. While they’re not real users, they could be.”

Diverse across gender, age, geography and race, and featuring various levels of engagement with Bates, the personas include prospective students and parents, current parents, alumni and non-Bates users such as a prospective staff member and a journalist.

For example, a persona representing an accepted student from Portland, Ore., wants to understand her financial aid package. The persona of a young alumna wants to network with other alumni and wants her opinion about Bates issues heard, while the Bates alumnus who’s also a Bates parent wants coordinated parent-alumni communications.

Armed with a feedbag full of feedback, the group identified several major goals and set out to create solutions to meet them. Goals such as:

Make the site fully usable to visitors regardless of one’s device, screen size or other technology, including Internet connection speed. The new site is fully responsive, featuring appropriate “break points” where the layout changes to meet the need of users’ various screen sizes.

The remodeled Bates home page as it will appear to a mobile user.

Update the site’s visual presentation in light of current industry trends and standards. That meant eliminating the old rotation of five full-screen images. “There’s reason to believe most users tune out those animations,” Cluchey says. “Metrics tell us that users don’t click on them as much as you think they might.” The new homepage features six major stories at all times, and the featured story changes randomly each time a user lands on the site. The new site also features an improved presentation of the ever-popular Bates slideshows.

Use data to streamline the site’s navigation and to create clear and intuitive pathways to content. Here, the use of personas inspired the creation of “Audience Message Boxes” on the homepage, four differently hued rectangles geared to specific audiences and messages.

Improve the site search so that it better serves users. Last summer, the Google-driven search function was improved so that results pages look more familiar and display much better on mobile devices.

Mobile behavior drove most of the other changes in the site’s navigation and architecture, says Cluchey. The old home page had a confusing tangle of menus that totaled 159 links. Of all those links, 20 received 80 percent of the click action.

To be sure, the number and placement of hyperlinks, especially in a site’s main navigation in prime real estate at the top of a page, is as much a political question as a web architecture one.

To answer those political questions in an apolitical way, the BCO remodel team asked four questions:

What is being clicked? The top clicks included, for example, the course catalog, so it and other popular links stayed.

What are visitors viewing that’s not in the menu? The popular “About Us” and Bates College Store are among those added to the new menu.

What are the top tasks each persona needs to execute? Tasks like making a gift, knowing about campus events, using the alumni directory and finding admission information — top needs for many of the personas — continue to be doable in the new menu.

Finally, what links should appear because they reflect institutional importance and values? Answering this question meant adding a link to the president’s office, among others.

After all was said and answered, the team was able to reduce the number of links in the new “drawer” navigation at the top of the page to just 30.

An early conceptual sketch of the remodeled home page suggests that when it comes to communications technology, paper still has its place!

While perhaps not within a single click from any given page, the rest of the site’s content is still easily findable.

As the group tweaked the site, they tested new features in various ways, including hallway testing with students in Commons and usability tests with alumni and other stakeholders.

That provided “great actionable feedback,” Cluchey says. “For example, it led to us to increase the size of the new menu bar and add clear headings to the new homepage elements.”

The remodeled website, still using WordPress for its content management, offers a freshened version of the award-winning major site redesign from 2011.

That redesign was a complete razing of the prior site and delivered vastly improved site-wide consistency, a better ability to track metrics and higher participation by campus offices, Cluchey says.

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/10/31/bates-website-remodel/feed/0Vice President for Information and Library Services Eugene Wiemers to retirehttp://www.bates.edu/news/2014/10/29/vice-president-for-information-and-library-services-eugene-wiemers-to-retire/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/10/29/vice-president-for-information-and-library-services-eugene-wiemers-to-retire/#commentsWed, 29 Oct 2014 14:00:15 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=81878Wiemers built an "integrated library and information services organization [that is] regarded as a national model among liberal arts colleges," said President Spencer.]]>

After 20 years of service to Bates College, Vice President for Information and Library Services Eugene Wiemers will retire on June 30, 2015.

Vice President for Information and Library Services Eugene Wiemers will retire from the college on June 30, 2015. (Mike Bradley/Bates College)

In sharing the news with the college community, President Clayton Spencer said that “it is difficult to imagine running the college without Gene Wiemers. He is the consummate institutional leader — he sets clear goals and objectives and works collaboratively across the college to achieve them. The results speak for themselves. Our integrated library and information services organization is regarded as a national model among liberal arts colleges.

“I am enormously grateful for Gene’s long and distinguished service to Bates and for his wise counsel in my first years on campus.”

Reflecting on his two decades of service to Bates, Wiemers said, “It is a cliché to say that our greatest asset is our staff, but it is true. My finest accomplishment has been to surround myself with people in libraries, archives and IT who are younger, smarter and faster than I am, and to learn from them every day.

“It has been a honor to work with them as we set very ambitious goals for Bates and work toward continuously doing better.”

An emphasis on aligning IT and library operations to meet the goals of the college.

Wiemers came to Bates in 1994 as librarian of the college, serving as a member of the college’s information services management team. He assumed leadership of all information and technology operations in 2000, bringing into a single organization the operations of the George and Helen Ladd Library, information technology, archives, media and telecommunications services. Wiemers became vice president in 2005.

He emphasized aligning IT and library operations to meet the goals of the college with uniformly high expectations of service. He organized the college’s first dedicated academic technology and Web services units, and worked to adapt the structure and function of all ILS operations to continuous changes in technology.

Bates Professor of Sociology Sawyer Sylvester, who has worked closely with Wiemers as a longtime member of the faculty’s Library Committee, believes Bates is fortunate to have had Wiemers as librarian during the library’s most expansive period.

“Part of his genius has been to join the traditional library with computing and improve each by that marriage,” Sylvester said. “Withal, his skill as an administrator is unparalleled, hiring a superb staff of librarians and giving them his full support.”

As information technology has changed the concept of libraries and the types of resources they should provide, Wiemers has been instrumental in keeping the college’s library and technology services current and relevant.

Recognizing that students were coming to Bates with increasing expectations from academic and communications technology, he has welcomed their input, even as staff and faculty members worked to hone students’ skills. He has worked to infuse and upgrade technology in all the teaching, learning and office spaces on campus, providing uniformly high quality technology in all classrooms and meeting rooms, and has championed the automation of business processes throughout the college.

Wiemers oversaw the merger of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and the library’s Special Collections department in 2000, in the process creating the first Bates College Archives. With colleagues at Colby and Bowdoin, Wiemers and his Bates team helped to build the CBB Library consortium into one of the nation’s most successful collaborations of small college libraries.

From 2002 to 2004, he led the team that comprehensively reviewed Bates operations, practices and systems in the Department of Security and Campus Safety and led the effort to support their work with new technologies. He has served on a dozen external review or New England Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation teams for liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.

Wiemers has served on multiple search committees at Bates, including three vice presidential and one presidential search committee. He has also chaired or served on dozens of institutional committees, including the Facilities Master Planning Steering Committee: and all the college’s strategic planning committees since 1995.

“The dean of those of us who manage merged organizations.”

Wiemers has been an active member of his professional community nationally as a presenter at conferences and member of committees and review boards.

”He is the dean of those of us who manage merged organizations, the person we have turned to for advice and guidance,” said Elliott Shore, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries and former head of libraries and IT at Bryn Mawr College.

Before coming to Bates, Wiemers held leadership positions at a number of university libraries, including those at Northwestern, Michigan State and the University of Minnesota. He also served as lecturer in Latin American studies at Minnesota and the University of Chicago.

Wiemers graduated summa cum laude from Macalester College in 1970 with a B.A. in history, pursued Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and received a master’s degree and doctorate in Latin American history from the University of Chicago. In 1979, he earned a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Wiemers plans to continue enjoying life in the beautiful state of Maine, to travel with his wife, Nancy Jennings, and to “keep up with our two daughters and their families and careers.”

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/10/29/vice-president-for-information-and-library-services-eugene-wiemers-to-retire/feed/0Gloom and misery begone? Statistics gets a major makeover from a student-professor teamhttp://www.bates.edu/news/2014/05/22/statistics-douglass-short-term-course-redesign/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/05/22/statistics-douglass-short-term-course-redesign/#commentsThu, 22 May 2014 19:00:04 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=78572The bane of many social science majors, statistics will be taught far differently next year, thanks to a student-faculty team led by Professor of Psychology Amy Douglass.]]>

It’s a staple of the social sciences, yet learning stats has bedeviled generations of college students. At Bates, professors have tried to do something about it.

In the 1970s, Bates psychologist Drake Bradley responded to the call to improve the teaching of statistics by using an innovative tool — the computer — to teach the ins and outs of data sets. He published a paper on it: “An interactive data-generating and answer-correcting system for problems in statistics.”

Today, Professor of Psychology Amy Douglass is using her own innovative strategy.

Professor of Psychology Amy Douglass gathers her six-student team at the start of Short Term. Their goal: to transform how statistics is taught at Bates. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Despite tweaks to the Bates statistics course over the years, Douglass says that many students still have a hard time.

“If the course is ever going to appeal to students who are less comfortable with statistics, I need to understand the student experience,” she says.

So Douglass took advantage of a distinctive new Bates program offered this Short Term.

“We’re all about a continuous process of renewal.”

Called “Innovative Pedagogy / Course (Re)Design,” the program gives faculty the time and support (in this case, Bates students) to rework an existing course or create a new one.

It’s highly unusual in American higher education: On a wide scale, Bates is giving students the lead in improving how college courses are designed, deployed and taught.

Douglass enlisted six students, including Foster, to improve the Bates statistics course, Psychology 218, and theirs was one of five Short Term courses whose goal was either to create a new course or improve an old one.+
Stephanie Kelley-Romano (rhetoric) and her students redesigned her course on presidential campaign rhetoric. The course typically includes a mock campaign, and she wants to create “policy modules” that will involve students from fields like politics or economics in the campaign experience.
Jason Castro (psychology and neuroscience) and his students built a new course in computational neuroscience, applying techniques from engineering and computer science to address fundamental questions of brain function.
Mara Tieken (education) and her students created a new course that does more than teach students about community organizing. The course will teach students how to organize, instilling a valuable set of skills, techniques and orientations.
Dennis Browne (Russian) and his students redesigned the college’s intermediate and advanced Russian language courses. Their goal is to create multi-level classes in which traditional pedagogical texts are replaced by authentic audio and visual materials.
Amy Douglass (psychology) and her students explored new ways to teach statistics — a challenging, math-intensive course — by drawing on real-world data and active learning strategies. Ultimately, information learned might inform discussions about how Bates teaches quantitative reasoning across the disciplines.

For the college, the course redesign program means that “we’re all about a continuous process of renewal,” says President Clayton Spencer. The new and revised courses “create new oxygen for the curriculum.”

“If the course is ever going to appeal to students who are less comfortable with statistics, I need to understand the student experience,” says Professor of Psychology Amy Douglass. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

They did their work by reviewing current best practices, reading literature and doing a survey of students who had taken statistics. Meeting four days a week with Douglass, the students also spent time outside class on various projects, from evaluating the effectiveness of quizzes to looking at how papers should be assigned.

Among other things, they learned from the survey that not one of 50 students surveyed felt that the textbook was at all helpful. On the other hand, every student said the weekly review sessions offered by Brian Pfohl, the department’s assistant in instruction, were “very helpful.”

By next winter, students who take statistics — required for the 70 or so majors who graduate in psychology or neuroscience each year — will experience a revised course that has student fingerprints all over it.

Here’s a general idea of how the course was formerly structured:

The class met three times a week

Weekly quiz on Mondays

Optional weekly review session on Friday afternoon

Four papers, known as “demonstration reports”

Cumulative final exam

And here’s an overview of the changes coming:

We don’t need no stinkin’ texbooks!

Much maligned by students for being dense and redundant, the statistics textbook is now gone from the syllabus. (At the very least, it will save students $130!)

Watch and learn

Next year, students will be asked to watch videos outside of class to help them master “hand calculations.” That’s the ability to do rough statistics calculations on your own.

“Being able to do hand calculations helps students understand what’s happening in the statistics software,” explains Patrece Joseph.

Hand calculations are lengthy and complicated. “Because students vary in how quickly they master them, the videos allow students to move at their own pace outside of class,” Douglass says.

More exams?

Instead of just one exam, the final, students will take three additional exams within the semester, each one testing students on material in one of the prior units.

True, adding exams increases the workload. “But we feel students need cumulative test experience before they take the final,” says Nina Tupper.

Adding more exams to the syllabus should help in the long run, says Nina Tupper ’14 of Kennebunk, Maine. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

No more Monday quizzes

The weekly quizzes will be on Friday from now on, and they’ll be at the beginning of class, not the end.

Having the quiz on Monday meant students boned up on Sunday, when there’s not a lot of academic support if they get stuck.

Giving a quiz at the end of class is when students aren’t at their best. Their brains are jumbled, the day’s new information competing with what they need to recall for the quiz.

Thank God it’s (not) Friday

Having optional review sessions on a Friday afternoon was difficult for student who had already spent an hour and 20 minutes in a lecture. “It’s hard to stay focused on statistics for three hours on a Friday afternoon,” says Kelsey Berry. They’ll be on Wednesday afternoons now.

Unit of measurement

To give the course more of a real-world feel, Douglass and her students have organized the class into four units: Health Psychology, Social Psychology, Psychology and Law, and Parenting and Families.

“We had units before, but they were week-to-week and perhaps not as cohesive,” Douglass says. “They will allow students to explore their interests while applying statistical knowledge.”

Speak now

When a professor teaches new ideas and new content right up until the last day of the semester, students don’t always learn well. But they do stress out.

Afifa Avril ’15 and Patrece Joseph ’14 talk at a campus event on May 15 where students from various Short Term courses made poster presentations. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

This winter, the statistics course will instead conclude with student presentations. “They’ll analyze a dataset, and talk about what they’ve learned,” says Eleanor Hough.

“Preparing an oral presentation makes a student think about the material in different ways,” says Afifa Avril. “It also doubles as a way for students to review material for the final”

Demo reports done differently

The course asks students to write demonstration reports in American Psychological Association style, meaning they needed four parts: Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion.

In addition, they write two appendixes, one for hand calculations and one that explains statistical concepts to a lay audience.

“We decided to eliminate two writing-intensive parts of the reports, the Introduction and Discussion,” Douglass says, “so students can focus more on the conceptual content of an APA-style report.”

It’s a sensible move. Learning to write an APA-style Introduction and Discussion is already taught in two required methods courses, Psychology 261 (“Research Methods”) and Psychology 262 (“Community-Based Research Methods”).

Pssst! SPSS Analyses!

Last year, students were required to do brief, outside-of-class analyses using a software known as
SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences).

Next year, students will do their statistical software analyses during class time, explains Margaret Foster. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Next year, students will do SPSS analyses in class. They’ll be harder, and will use student-designed worksheets. “Importantly, the worksheets will assume that students watched the videos about hand calculations,” says Douglass.

Meaning that when students come to class to do an SPSS analysis, they will (or should) be ready to roll.

“Moving the SPSS analyses into the class time will allow students to learn more about manipulating the numbers in a problem,” explains Foster.

“It’s like they’re paying it forward.”

Looking back on the experience with her students, Douglass says two things struck her: her students’ creative approaches to solving problems, and their abiding interest in making the course better for the next generation of students.

“Even though they’re done with it, they really care about making it better for the next cohort,” Douglass says. “It’s like they’re paying it forward.”

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/05/22/statistics-douglass-short-term-course-redesign/feed/0Short Term, alive and kicking and ‘optimized for experimentation,’ begins April 21http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/04/17/short-term-optimized-experimentation-2014/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/04/17/short-term-optimized-experimentation-2014/#commentsThu, 17 Apr 2014 18:37:07 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=77476Two intriguing new programs this spring will play to Short Term's founding tradition of innovation.]]>

The rumors of Short Term’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

At a presidential event in Boston in March, President Clayton Spencer and guest Al Filreis P’16, the University of Pennsylvania author and professor who teaches one of the most popular MOOCs anywhere, were taking questions from the audience.

When an alumna asked if a MOOC could work at Bates, Spencer took a moment to tout Bates’ strong culture of teaching innovation; at the same time, she put to rest rumors that the days of Short Term, which begins Monday, are numbered.

President Spencer talks about Short Term:

Maybe because it sticks out like a green thumb at the end of the Bates academic calendar, Short Term often seems ripe for review. Is it good enough? Can it be better?

And with a new president on board since 2012, folks have been curious about Spencer’s take on Short Term, the five-week, one-course spring experience beloved by Bates students since the mid-1960s.

As Spencer said in Boston, getting a big laugh, students are “flippin’ out that we’re going to eliminate Short Term.”

The answer, she said, is that “we’re not.”

The Boston faithful applauded, but the vote of confidence was qualified. “My feeling is that we have to optimize Short Term as a site for experimentation,” she said.

In that spirit, Bates is deploying two pilot programs this spring that play to Short Term’s founding tradition of innovation. And while the new programs might have the immediate effect of improving Short Term, they have a much larger purpose: Each supports the college’s primary strategic initiatives now being funded by the $11.5 million Catalyst Fund.

The three Bates initiatives:

The Engaged Liberal Arts: Deep and sustained interactions+The “engaged liberal arts” means delivering a rigorous and highly personalized education that centers on deep and sustained interactions among students, faculty, and community. It also means engaging the forces — intellectual trends, demographic changes, and technology — that are transforming higher education and the world into which our students graduate. It means making a virtue of our scale; creating a diverse and motivated community of students, faculty, and staff; and embracing innovative and evidence-based approaches to teaching and learning.

Purposeful Work: The heart of the liberal arts mission+Purposeful work is a college-wide initiative built on the premise that preparing students for lives of meaningful work lies at the heart of the liberal arts mission. When fully developed it will include: (1) a co-curricular program involving cycles of exploration, reflection, and skill-building; (2) practitioner-taught courses during short term, and (3) a highly-structured Bates-specific network of internships, with the hope to guarantee every Bates student a paid internship that is either employer- or Bates-sponsored.

Opportunity and Excellence: Directly out of Bates' history and mission+A commitment to opportunity and excellence grows directly out of Bates’ history and mission and responds to contemporary geographic, demographic, and economic realities. It means recruiting talented and motivated students from a broad range of backgrounds, providing them with the financial aid that will enable them to enroll, and supporting them for academic and personal success once here. It also means creating a campus community and climate that capitalize on diversity and inclusion as necessary and powerful dimensions of preparing our students to live and work in an increasingly interconnected world.

Anthropology major Devin Tatro ’14 talks with Saudi men at a desert farm during a 2012 Short Term trip to Saudi Arabia led by Dana Professor of Anthropology Loring Danforth. (Photograph by Ana Bisaillon ’12.)

This spring’s first pilot program, falling under the Purposeful Work umbrella, is a series of practitioner-taught courses that will give students fundamental understanding in four professional fields:

Shannon Banks ’85, a senior vice president at Martin’s Point Healthcare in Portland, will teach a course on healthcare administration.

Brandy Gibbs-Riley ’96, a graphic designer who has created branding and marketing campaigns for high-profile corporate and nonprofit clients, will teach graphic design.

Ben Schippers ’04 and Will Schenk, co-founders of the Brooklyn-based software development shop HappyFunCorp, will teach a course on digital innovation.

Craig Saddlemire ’05, a documentary filmmaker and former Lewiston city councilor, will teach social-change organizing and advocacy with Sarah Standiford ’97 of Planned Parenthood and Aditi Vaidya ’00 of the social-justice focused Solidago Foundation.

The second pilot program falls more under the Engaged Liberal Arts realm, and it features small groups of students — just a half-dozen or so — working with a professor to either redesign one of the professor’s own regular-semester courses or create a whole new course for next year.

“Students will have an amazing intellectual and conceptual experience.”

Known as “Pedagogical Innovation and Course (Re)Design,” the course-redesign projects promise to give faculty the necessary “time and space for the creative work of pedagogical innovation,” says sociology professor Emily Kane, who is spearheading the project.

For students, they promise intense and intimate engagement with faculty. “The students will have an amazing intellectual and conceptual experience,” said Spencer in Boston.

Five projects will get underway on Monday:

Stephanie Kelley-Romano (rhetoric) and her students will redesign her course on presidential campaign rhetoric. The course typically includes a mock campaign, and she wants to create “policy modules” that will involve students from fields like politics or economics in the campaign experience.

Jason Castro (psychology) and his students will build a new course in computational neuroscience so students can apply techniques from engineering and computer science to address fundamental questions of brain function.

Mara Tieken (education) and her students will create a new course that does more than teach students about community organizing.The course will teach students how to organize, instilling a valuable set of skills, techniques and orientations.

Dennis Browne (Russian) and his students will redesign the college’s intermediate and advanced Russian language courses. Their goal will be to create multi-level classes in which traditional pedagogical texts are replaced by authentic audio and visual materials.

Amy Douglass (psychology) and her students will explore new ways to teach statistics — a challenging, math-intensive course — by drawing on real-world data and active learning strategies. Ultimately, information learned during Short Term might inform discussions about how Bates teaches quantitative reasoning across the disciplines.

These new courses go along with all the regular Short Term courses, on and off campus.

This year, the suite of off-campus programs will see faculty and students studying human rights and art in Nogales, Mexico; Shakespeare in London; environment and culture in Russia; ecology and evolutionary biology in the Galapagos; culture within a European context in Berlin, German; and geology by kayak along the Maine coast.

A Short Term adventure in 1969 as Roy Farnsworth, then-associate professor of geology, and students in his Short Term field course prepare to hit the road in search of geologic and mining sites. Photo courtesy of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Whatever the era, one impulse to improve Short Term comes from an awareness on campus that students and faculty “pay” for those five weeks by having to pack a lot of teaching and learning into the rest of the academic year.

The winter term, especially, can feel hurried, an idea expressed by Professor of History Michael Jones a few years ago.

“Any Short Term course ought to be really good because intellectually they cost a lot.”

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/04/17/short-term-optimized-experimentation-2014/feed/0Yahoo buys Wander, social-media startup co-founded by Jeremy Fisher ’06http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/02/21/jeremy-fisher-06-wander-yahoo/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/02/21/jeremy-fisher-06-wander-yahoo/#commentsFri, 21 Feb 2014 15:41:19 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=75548In 2013, Wander created Days, an app that lets users gather their photos and GIFs in a daily, shareable package. "Days is a way to share a day in your life," Fisher says.]]>

The tech media report that Wander, the social-media startup co-founded by Jeremy Fisher ’06, was recently snapped up by Yahoo! Inc. for more than $10 million.

Jeremy Fisher ’06 is co-founder and CEO of Wander, developer of the Days app and recently sold to Yahoo.

Wander is the developer of Days, a photo-sharing app that lets users assemble, curate and share a visual diary of their day.

Wander was a graduate of Techstars, a startup accelerator program, in summer 2012, and since then had generated quite a bit of buzz as a “stealth startup.” Wander launched its Days app in spring 2013.

The best headline about the deal comes from New York Business Journal: “Yahoo indulges its Wander lust.”

That outlet notes that the deal is “the latest in a series of acquisitions by Yahoo, which has acquired 26 companies in the previous year.”

The dollar figure reported by TechCrunch has not been confirmed by Wander or Yahoo.

TechCrunch reports that Fisher, the firm’s CEO, and his Wander team will stay together and begin working on projects as a part of Yahoo’s Mobile and Emerging Products team, based in New York City. Days will continue as a standalone app.

“Days is a way to share a day in your life.”

The Days app creates social engagement around one of the most common phrases in human communication: “How was your day?”

App users can take photos and create animated gGIFs during their day, then the app gathers them in a sharable package called, what else, a “Day.”

“The idea is this,” says TechCrunch‘s Jordan Crook. “Rather than sharing bite-sized moments in real time, Days is about sharing an entire story of how your day went. By tying everyday experiences together, Days lets you share mundane things like your morning coffee or your cat and, thanks to the context created within the story, those mundane things become more ‘share-worthy.'”

I asked Fisher about how theDays app grew out of his vision for Wander.

“The goal for Wander was to give people a way to capture and share their experience of the world,” he says. “Days was designed to get people to do that every day, to make a habit of capturing and sharing their experience of the world. Days is a way to share a day in your life.”

And how might a Bates person use Days?

“I’d would love to see a day in the life of a professor in the field.”

Students work through a business challenge at Koru. Bates has partnered with the Seattle-based firm in the launch of an initiative designed to give students the opportunity to hone skills needed by forward-looking, high-growth employers. (Photograph courtesy of Koru)

Bates is one of 13 colleges and universities across the nation that are founding partners in an effort to improve students’ career prospects through workplace immersion programs.

Bates President Clayton Spencer announced today that the college is partnering with the Seattle firm Koru in the launch of an initiative designed to give students the opportunity to hone skills needed by forward-looking, high-growth employers.

“Preparing students for purposeful work is central to the liberal arts mission, making this partnership particularly exciting for Bates,” says Spencer. “A liberal arts education equips our students with high-level analytical and critical thinking skills, creative approaches to problem-solving and habits of collaboration incorporating multiple perspectives.

“Preparing students for purposeful work is central to the liberal arts mission, making this partnership particularly exciting for Bates,” says President Clayton Spencer. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

“The Koru program will build on this foundation by providing hands-on experience in the workplace that will allow our students to hone a set of skills more specific to career success. Everyone wins.”

Koru’s programming is designed to foster workplace effectiveness through exposure to actual work environments and the development of practical skills, professional networking and personal confidence.

Executives from high-growth companies will coach Bates students in specific but broadly applicable skills, such as design thinking and rapid prototyping, financial analysis and Excel use and workplace efficacy, including business communications, interpersonal effectiveness and high-impact presentations.

Koru’s approach fits well with the principles and values undergirding Bates’ college-wide initiative on purposeful work.

Through self-assessment and interviewing sessions, they will learn to present themselves positively as job candidates. In the process, they will build a direct network of connections with professionals and with other talented students.

Koru’s approach fits well with the principles and values undergirding Bates’ college-wide initiative on purposeful work. Led by a working group of faculty and staff, this initiative builds on the premise that preparing students for lives of meaningful work lies at the heart of the liberal arts mission.

When the initiative is fully developed, Bates will offer every student a four-year course of co-curricular programming including cycles of exploration, reflection and skill-building; practitioner-taught courses during the college’s five-week spring term; and a highly structured Bates-specific network of funded internships.

Koru’s programming is designed to foster workplace effectiveness through exposure to actual work environments and the development of practical skills, professional networking and personal confidence. (Photograph courtesy of Koru)

In the Koru program, students from Bates and partner colleges will work in teams to design solutions to business problems submitted by a corporation that is actually hiring. Initial partners are outdoor outfitter REI and the online marketplace zulily. The teams will ultimately present their solutions to the company’s corporate leadership, receiving real-time feedback on their ideas and presentation skills.

The Koru program includes structured time for reflection, seen as key to the goal of harmonizing the students’ academic training with their experiences during the Koru immersions.

“The piece I really like is that the program focuses on high-growth, innovative companies,” adds David McDonough, director of the Bates Career Development Center. Koru emphasizes close engagement with employers like REI, zulily, Trupanion and Smartsheet, which are seeking a better way to recruit early-career talent.

Four Koru program sessions of four weeks each are planned, taking place in Seattle in June, July and September, and in San Francisco in September. Bates will place from six to eight students in Koru programs during June and July of this year.

Koru was founded by Kristen Hamilton, former co-founder at Onvia and COO at World Learning, and Josh Jarrett, former head of Higher Education Innovation for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and consultant with McKinsey & Company. Learn more.

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/02/20/career-immersion-program-with-koru-supports-bates-purposeful-work-initiative/feed/2Ladd Library’s new online CBB catalog has a back-end surprisehttp://www.bates.edu/news/2014/02/06/ladd-librarys-new-online-cbb-catalog-has-a-back-end-surprise/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/02/06/ladd-librarys-new-online-cbb-catalog-has-a-back-end-surprise/#commentsThu, 06 Feb 2014 21:10:20 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=71549 The most intriguing aspect of the new CBBcat might be that collaboration is at its core. ]]>

Cooperation that began on a low key in 1977 hit a high note today when Ladd Library and its counterparts at Bowdoin and Colby unveiled an improved online catalog.

Given the reputation of the CBB colleges as competitors, the most intriguing aspect of the new CBBcat might be that collaboration is at its core, says Laura Juraska, an associate librarian at Ladd Library.

Instead of drawing from separate databases at each college, the new CBBcat draws from a single shared database.

The Ladd Library card catalog of the 1970s, seen here, has given way to its latest iteration: an online catalog based on a single database shared by Bates, Bowdoin and Colby colleges. (Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collection Library)

“The back-end change of going to a single database is a strong affirmation of CBB library cooperation,” says Juraska, who oversees reference services.

On the front end, users will encounter a streamlined catalog search experience. Where users once had to choose whether to search the Bates catalog or the CBBcat (itself a three-database system), today visitors to bates.edu/library/catalogs see just one search window called the “Colby, Bates & Bowdoin Merged Catalog.”

Another benefit is that users can target a search specifically to one of the three libraries. Still another is being able to browse, in a virtual sense, a shelf of books from all three colleges, neatly arranged by their call numbers, thus taking advantage of collections that the three libraries now regard as one.

The combined catalog builds on existing cooperative practices, including shared purchasing, especially of scholarly monographs — that is, books by scholars that plumb the depths of a specialized academic subject — and shared licensing of electronic databases and online journals.

“The new database enables our colleges to improve service, reduce duplication of effort and reduce operating costs of the catalog,” says Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services and librarian of the college.

The new online catalog is the product of months of collaborative work by CBB staff members, says Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services and librarian. (Mike Bradley/Bates College)

The new setup affords a “common platform,” Wiemers says, “so that we can take advantage of the diverse talent all three colleges have in providing library service without having to multiply everything we do by three.”

Wiemers praised the work of dozens of CBB staff members who teamed up on the project over many months, calling attention to the “the expert leadership” of Sharon Saunders, Bates associate librarian for systems and bibliographic services.

Beyond CBBcat, the refreshed site will also feature a robust new search engine called LibrarySearch+.

This engine allows users to go beyond CBB content to include the library’s online journals, newspapers and article-indexing databases as well as other open digital collections and open-access archives. Users can limit, modify and define search results in much the same way as on an e-commerce site such as Amazon.

Since the books we’re talking about are primarily in print, the most visible end result of CBB cooperation — the interlibrary loan — still occurs in the real world of bricks, mortar and highways.

These days, a commercial service managed by the Maine State Library offers one-day pickup and dropoff service at the CBB colleges and other Maine libraries, so there’s no long wait for books to arrive.

That service is offered five days a week, and the CBB libraries add Saturday delivery, so students can have the books (or CDs, DVDs and sometimes vinyl LPs) they need by Sunday. “That’s traditionally the busiest day for college libraries,” says Juraska.

CBB cooperation started with reciprocal borrowing privileges in 1977. It’s has grown to embrace online sharing, including partnerships with Maine InfoNet, a collaborative of Maine academic, public, school and special libraries; and NExpress, which connects Bates to liberal arts college libraries in Massachusetts and Vermont.

The work to expand collaboration and sharing has been supported by two major grants to CBB libraries from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Juraska says that each move toward greater cooperation “is all about opportunities. Once you have a single tool that people at all three colleges can use, then you can identify efficiencies, where one person can do the task for their colleagues at Colby and Bowdoin.”

And the very process reaching agreement on a single database has yielded its own benefits, because “it’s made us agree on things, come to consensus.”

When the libraries first automated their circulation systems in 1988, the CBB libraries had the choice of creating one database, but the time wasn’t right, said Juraska. “Now it’s so logical. Nobody doubts that it is the right thing to do.”

“Cider is having a moment, and these boys have made it their mission to build New England’s first and largest craft hard cider company,” says Forbes.

Matt Brockman ’08 is a co-owner of Downeast Cider.

Ross Brockman and Mosher are co-founders of Downeast Cider while Ross’ brother, Matt, came on as a co-owner in 2012.

Initially based in Waterville, Maine, the ciderhouse moved operations to Leominster, Mass., in 2012 before settling in the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown.

The co-founders told Gary Dzen ’05, who covers craft beer for The Boston Globe, that the move to Charlestown reflects “a lot of excitement in the craft alcoholic beverage industry right now.” Boston, they say, “is square in the thick of things.”

At first only available on tap in bars and restaurants, Downeast is now canned and sold at any number of stores or “packies” (for you Boston readers) in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

The Portland, Maine-based company has signed up more than 10,000 veterinarians so far, Murphy reports, and was recently named the 24th fastest-growing company in the U.S. by Inc Magazine with three-year growth of 8,585 percent and annual revenues of $14.6 million.

Ben Shaw ’00, CEO of Vets First Choice, speaks with guests at a Welcome Event for President Clayton Spencer at the Portland Museum of Art on May 8, 2013. (Mike Bradley/Bates College)

In simple terms, Vets First Choice enters the picture when a pet owner needs a medication.

“Vets are having to stock all these medications in the event someone might walk in the door and need it,” Shaw says. “It’s inefficient to have so many medications on hand for a relatively small customer base.”

Instead, a pet owner can order medication from Vets First Choice.

“It’s really a transformative time in veterinary medicine, and veterinarians are fascinating and terrific customers,” Shaw says.

“Increasingly, veterinarians are ending the inventorying of medicines in their practices. The medicines ship from our warehouse to the client, and the vet no longer has to be burdened with [carrying] a large amount of product. We have a lot of practices where we manage probably 80 percent-plus of their inventory.”